Twitter’s Community Notes Is Ushering In The Death Of Pseudo “Fact Checkers”

Twitter Community Notes has been a glorious social invention in response to both misleading news as well as misleading “fact checkers.” You can think of Community Notes as crowd-sourced sticky notes added to tweets that users believed needed more context. How is this different from so-called fact checkers? In all the important ways, actually. You’ve probably come across a political article on Facebook or tried to share something about Covid-19 anywhere online and instantly been hit with the obligatory “fact check,” which can come from a biased organization, publication, or government agency (like the CDC). 

Twitter Community Notes, by contrast, is not some committee made up of upper Twitter management. Instead, it’s the Twitter community at large. You can sign up to become a contributor to the Community Notes feature, which at this time, is publicly available to everyone in the U.S. In January, it was announced that it was expanding to include contributors from the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. To become a Community Notes contributor, you must have no recent violations of Twitter rules, have joined Twitter at least six months ago, have a verified phone number with a trusted phone carrier, and not be associated with other Community Notes accounts. 

How Does Community Notes on Twitter Work?

The “About Community Notes” page explains, “This is an open and transparent process, that’s why we’ve made the Community Notes algorithm open source and publicly available on GitHub, along with the data that powers it so anyone can audit, analyze or suggest improvements.” Twitter management itself cannot write or edit Community Notes – it’s up to Community Notes contributors to rate a note’s helpfulness. Once users have rated a sufficient number of Community Notes, they can unlock the ability to write notes themselves. 

These notes are meant to give important context where it’s missing, correct false information, and explain why something may be misleading. When organizations have an ideological bias, this affects the so-called fact-checking of social and political statements, often subconsciously. As the community of users gets to rate the helpfulness of these notes, this allows fellow users of all ideological leanings to determine if something is useful information or not. If a user racks up too many “not helpful” ratings on their Community Notes, they can lose the privilege of writing new notes through temporary locking of this feature until they are able to earn it back.

Community Notes give important context where it’s missing, correct false information, and explain why something may be misleading. 

Safeguards Against Ill-Intentioned Users

That’s all well and good, but can’t these Community Notes be weaponized just as easily as supposed fact checks on Snopes? The process isn’t foolproof, but it’s proving to be a much more useful resource that has built-in safeguards to protect individuals from the tyranny of the majority and nefarious intentions. Let’s say someone adds a community note that is intentionally misleading, spiteful, or malicious, but it has earned a “helpful” rating because a sufficient number of people rated it as helpful. If the account belonging to the original tweet believes the attached note to be unhelpful because it doesn’t actually add additional context or shouldn’t be there for some reason, they can request additional review. These reviews, again, are not performed by Twitter but by regular people who use the social media site and signed up as Community Notes contributors. In essence, community notes of the people, by the people, for the people.

Community Notes in Practice: Shutting Down Intentionally Misleading Mainstream Media

These notes, in practice, have been a riot and a godsend in the war against mainstream media over misinformation. In the past, large publications, media conglomerates, and public figures got away with intentionally misleading the public. Now, when they attempt to share their gerrymandered statistics and graphs that present a doctored image of reality, a community note of wisdom magically appears to add much-needed context. 

Take this monstrosity of journalistic integrity, for example. BBC News World shared a news article on Twitter with the title "Why some people are spreading false rumours about the Texas gunman," with the face of political commentator Tim Pool selected as the featured image. The implication of the featured image, to the unsuspecting reader, is that Tim Pool was somehow involved in the shooting. The image also looked suspiciously like a mug shot-style photo. A community note was added that read, “For the sake of clarity, the thumbnail which the BBC have used in this tweet does not represent the Texas gunman or anyone connected with him. It's a 2012 photo of journalist and commentator Tim Pool, who has questioned some aspects of the narrative." This promptly led to BBC deleting the tweet and replying, “This tweet replaces an earlier tweet containing an inaccurate image.”

Another interesting Community Notes incident claimed Chelsea Clinton as its victim. Clinton claimed that over 50% of the last year’s attempted book bans involved books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes, and shared an article making the same argument. A community note was added to add context that the book shown in the thumbnail, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, contains sexually explicit material, including visual depictions of oral sex, masturbation, and sexual contact with a minor. Are you seeing the value of these notes, now? 

Gone are the days when political and public figures could make egregious, irresponsible, or misleading claims and get away with it.

Gone are the days when political and public figures could make egregious and irresponsible claims and get away with it while leaving out vital pieces of context – like when new Gen Z darling of the Democratic Party Harry Sisson shared a video shutting down any rumors that he’s been “paid off by the DNC,” insisting he’s never accepted money from Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, or the deep state. The video got community noted by users who thought it was important for viewers to know that in late 2022, Biden's campaign team connected with young social media influencers, one of whom was Harry Sisson, to draw in young voters aged 18-29. Also in the note was the fact that Sisson recently signed with Palette Management, which has received over $200k from the DNC within the past eight months. These claims are backed by high-quality sources. In other words, he does receive money from the DNC indirectly.

Medhi Hasan, who hosts a show on MSNBC, got clowned on by Community Notes when he attempted to "debunk" claims made by Bill Maher about black-on-black crime. Hasan tweeted a clip of his show, in which he claimed “Chicago isn't even in the top 10 or top 20 deadliest cities in America and ranks below cities in red states like Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Columbus, Georgia.” He goes on to claim that the issue of black-on-black crime is just a racist dog whistle because white people kill other white people at almost the same rate. In response to his previous tweet, he links to an article by USA Today and provides this quote from the article, “Rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black homicide are similar, at around 80% and 90%. Overall, most homicides in the United States are intraracial, and the rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black killings are similar” as evidence for his claims.

Let’s start with the first tweet, which includes Hasan’s over three-minute rant about how black-on-black crime is a made-up issue and that white-on-white crime is statistically on par with black-on-black crime. A community note was added to provide the following context: “According to the 2019 FBI stats, there were 2594 white-on-white homicides and 2574 black-on-black homicides. In 2019, white population in the U.S. was 60.1% of total population. Black was 12.2%. Thus the per capita murder rate was much higher in the black-on-black group.” 

In his follow-up tweet, Hasan uses misleading numbers and words like “rates” to falsely claim that intraracial crime is the same in both white and black communities. Here, a community note reads, “The rate of black-on-black killings (53.38/million) was ~5.3x higher than that of white-on-white (10.03/million) in the U.S. in 2019, according to data from the FBI and the Census Bureau. Black killers killed 89% of black victims. White killers killed 79% of white victims.” Note that both of these community notes reference FBI crime statistics and government census data for their information, not a biased USA Today article. 

Instead of correcting himself, Hasan, or as some like to call him, Medhi “Community Note” Hasan, later lashed out at Community Notes on his platform, saying, “A reminder that ‘Community Notes’ and ‘context’ on Twitter is largely rightwing.” The best part is this tweet was, you guessed it, community noted, with an explanation that Community Notes don’t work by majority rules. “To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.”

Closing Thoughts

While Community Notes can be a fun way to dispel misleading and false information, it would be tone-deaf to not acknowledge that it has the power to be a buzzkill, if not misused entirely. Just as it was annoying, unnecessary, and overbearing for the CDC to place fact-checks and disclaimers on any posts containing the words Covid-19 on social media, likewise, Community Notes can be a killjoy when a meme account is trying to make a tongue-in-cheek joke only for someone with hall monitor energy to waltz in and slap a fact check on what was already a clearly facetious statement. 

For instance, this tweet that says matter-of-factly, “It's insane that over half of deaths in Canada now are medically assisted suicides,” might seem like blatant fake news, but that’s exactly the point. That’s the joke. We don’t need a community note to set the record straight that half of all deaths in Canada are not by state-assisted suicide (the real rate, according to the note’s sources, is 3.3%.) The only thing worse than bad-faith discourse is explaining a joke. What I’m getting at is the old Spider-Man adage, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I love owning smug people on Twitter making false claims as much as the next person, but please, don’t tread on my memes!

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